Ben Peterson's Newsana aims to be an ambitious news aggregation site covering a multitude of topics.

In an Internet littered with viral kittens and crazy Kardashians, kernels of real news can get lost.

Ben Peterson intends to pluck that wheat from the dizzying digital chaff.

A son of former Ontario premier David Peterson, the 36-year-old Torontonian is a co-founder of Newsana, a web site that aims to give its patrons a daily aggregate of the world’s most important information.

“Our mission at Newsana, our goal, is ultimately to become the world’s arbiter of high-quality news, analysis, ideas and opinions,” Peterson says. “The biggest problem with the online news experience right now is there is just too much content.”

Peterson says the winnowed content Newsana provides will be largely free of the bellicose partisanship that poisons much of the web today, with the site presenting, to the extent possible, neutral and informed assessments of science, politics, entertainment and other subjects.

“Partisanship is a huge part of the online world (but) at Newsana we don’t take any shots,” he says. “We’re a platform. You can be a conservative, you can be a liberal, you can be anything you want.”

While anyone can visit the site, not everyone can be a member.

Contributors to Newsana must apply to the service’s masters and show a proved expertise in the area on which they would post.

“Members apply to have the privilege of posting content on to our site,” Peterson says. “And if your application gets approved, you’re able then to post whatever story you want … and comment on it however you wish.”

Other members read those posts, comment and vote on them, bumping them higher or lower in terms of site presence in the process.

“So from a news consumer perspective, Newsana provides you with the highest-quality content in a particular subject,” Peterson says.

Currently, the site presents postings on some 40 subjects but Peterson hopes to up that into the thousands as it matures.

“As we grow, we almost want to become like a Wikipedia of the news,” he says. “It will be a place where you can go to find the highest-quality content … across multitudes of subjects.”

Peterson says decisions about how best to monetize Newsana will be made in the New Year, with a subscription fee being a distinct possibility.

Had his childhood experience of the media been any guide, Peterson may well have taken up another calling as his father’s relations with the Queen’s Park press gallery were often fractious.

But his interest in communicating information was born during a post-university stint in Ghana, where he wrote reports for the United Nations on human rights in that West African country.

“Through my work there I came to the strong conclusion that the media had the potential to play a tremendous role in improving the … situation in Ghana,” Peterson says.

He went on in 2002 to help found Journalists for Human Rights, a group that promotes a strengthened press, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

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